Mike did a double take and then looked at him very hard. It was obvious this was a revelation. "Goddam, you've got mercury contamination in this pit?"

Gerfertig looked nervous and confused at the same time. "I've tried to figure it out myself. I don't understand it at all."

Mike was getting hostile and his body language showed it. "How complicated can mercury contamination be? It's easy to test for!"

Gerfertig looked helpless. "We've found in inside some of clay lumps."

Now, even the little geology I knew made me jump on that statement. "That's ridiculous. Mercury doesn't occur free in nature. Even I know that. And this isn't its ore. That's called cinnabar. It can't be mercury. Did you test it?"

The manager looked like we wouldn't believe him. And we didn't. "We collected a sample. It was mercury all right. But... different." He trailed off.

Mike and I both looked at him like he was crazy. I lost my patience and jumped in. "When you say 'we collected a sample', do you mean 'you', or do you mean some other people?"

Mike piled on. "Let me guess. The three sick guys either handled the sample or were there when you hit some of this stuff."

The manager nodded. "Actually, there were four sick men. The fourth guy wasn't too sick and he took off and headed back to Mexico."

"Let's get back to your office and lab. Now." Mike barked. It was a very tense ride back to the main building. Gerfertig steered and looked straight ahead like he was afraid. Mike was seething. I knew I was breathing hard, and my mind was racing.

When we got back to the office, Mike slammed his door. "Well, since we are playing truth or dare, or some damn thing like it, I guess I'll let you know Mr. Koster here is not an environmental engineer. He's a chemist, specializing in nuclear chemistry."

I didn't react to the lie, but in the most professional tone I could muster, I asked Gerfertig "Have you seen any evidence of radiation contamination?"

I thought, and Mike later told me he thought the same thing, that the manager was reaching to scratch his head. Instead his hand came up with a tuft of hair as a tear rolled down his cheek and he began to shake.

"Oh, God," was all I could say.

Mike drove the Ford 350 to Gerfertig's home, which was in the piney woods nearby on company property. He was a widower and so there was no one home. It was obvious, after he got himself together, that he was scared, not only for himself but also for the employees, to whom he felt a genuine responsibility.

Mike explained that the cancers in the three hospitalized men made him suspect a radiological contamination, and he thought we were the men to look into it, because of his experience and my "problem solving skills."

Gerfertig told how, after they had progressed into the new section, they had first found a strange lump in the clay, maybe a little larger than a basketball. He wasn't in the pit that day, but he was told how the backhoe operator cracked open the lump and how the 'mercury' ran out along the ground.

During the past month, they found three of these balls. Everyone assumed they contained mercury, although one or two veteran workers seemed to recall, as I knew, that you don't dig up pure mercury. Gerfertig instructed the workers not to mix the clay from the lumps into the regular stockpile, but put it aside for testing. The workers, made up of equal parts of poor whites and Mexicans, saw this as a gesture of concern.

One thing that was reported back to him was that some men said when they tore open a lump they swore they heard an almost electrical crackling sound; others said they smelled ozone. The mercury had quickly seeped into the ground, and lumps changed color, going from a darker to lighter red, almost immediately after opening.

There were no obvious health problems up until a week ago, he said, although some of the men complained of palpitations and the sweats. But none of the men had touched or gotten very close to any of the lumps. However, a few weeks ago, one dozer operator let his blade hit a lump and rest on it. He jumped from his seat and jumped off the machine because he swore he felt an electric shock.

Gerfertig said he gave the men in the pit instructions to call him when they uncovered the next one of these clay lumps. When they did, two men waited with an ore bucket while two other men were with the dozer, one in the seat and the other hanging on the side.

Gerfertig watched as the dozer blade pressed down upon the clay lump and it sundered like an old rubber ball.

One man scooped up the silvery liquid with a ladle while the second held the bucket and closed the lid. Gerfertig said he was unhappy when he noticed at the last minute the man with the ladle left his gloves hanging on his belt. It was obvious the liquid was putting out fumes and the men hurried back to the lab in a rattletrap pickup only used in the pit.

The man running the dozer said he did feel a slight shock when the blade made contact. The second man on the dozer, who got a whiff of the fumes as they quickly rose upward, immediately complained that his chest hurt.